“Herein!” cried a guttural German voice.
The room into which they entered would have been entitled to a place in any museum for showing the mode of life of the twentieth-century Germans. With its stuffy red rep curtains, its big green majolica stove, its heavy mahogany furniture, its oleographs of Bismarck, Roon, and Moltke, it might have been lifted bodily from a bourgeois house in the Fatherland.
A man was sitting at a mahogany roll-top desk as they entered. The air in the room was thick with the fumes of the cheap Dutch cigar he was smoking. He was a sturdily built fellow with blond hair shaven so close to the skull that at a distance he seemed to be bald.
At the sound of their entrance, he rose and faced them. When he stood erect the sturdiness of his build became accentuated, and they saw he was a man of medium height, but so muscular that he looked much shorter. A pair of large tortoise-shell spectacles straddled a big beak-like nose, and he wore a heavyish blond moustache with its points trained upwards and outwards rather after the fashion made famous in the Fatherland by William Hohenzollern. In his ill-cut suit of cheap-looking blue serge, which he wore with a pea-green tie, Robin thought he looked altogether a typical specimen of the German of the non-commissioned officer class.
“You ask for me?” he said in deep guttural accents, looking at Robin; “I am Herr Schulz!”
The German’s manner was cold and formal and Robin felt a little dashed.
“My name is Greve,” he began rather hurriedly. “I understand you received a visit to-day from a young English lady, a Miss Trevert ...”
The German let his eyes travel slowly from Robin to the doctor and back again. He did not offer them a chair and all three remained standing.
“Ye-es, and what if I did?”
Robin felt his temper rising.